The present invention relates generally to a bio-surveillance system that monitors the symptoms of people in need of medical assistance and generates an alert when the monitored symptoms exceed a trigger.
Emergency services dispatchers use a dispatcher computer system that prompts them through a series of questions to ask a caller about the details of the emergency, such as the symptoms of a person needing medical assistance. Based upon the responses to the questions, the dispatcher computer system makes a preliminary assessment or diagnosis which is communicated to the emergency response personnel.
Recently, there have been fears of biological or chemical terrorist attacks. In response to these fears, the assignee of the present invention has developed a bio-surveillance system that monitors the number of occurrences of certain assessments or diagnosis from the dispatcher computer system. The bio-surveillance system compares a trailing 12-hour total of selected assessments to a trigger threshold, which varies based upon the time of the day and the day of the week. The trigger is set to some statistical variation of the historical data, such as the historical average plus two standard deviations. When the number of assessments exceeds the trigger, an alert is activated that indicates that there may possibly be a biological or chemical attack. The system assists emergency personnel and governmental authorities in identifying and responding to a potential threat as early as possible.
There are several drawbacks to the existing system. For one, the bio-surveillance system relies upon the preliminary assessment or diagnosis of the dispatchers. By following the pre-programmed series of questions, the dispatchers have a strong tendency to make assessments that are statistically more likely, and they are unlikely to make conclusions of statistically unlikely problems.
For example, although there is a current concern regarding biological attacks, a dispatcher is unable, or unlikely, to conclude based upon the responses to the questions that the person in need of assistance has Anthrax, small pox or is suffering from a chemical attack or other extremely rare problem. The dispatcher computer system is programmed to quickly assess statistically high likelihood problems and is not programmed to assess rare diseases from terrorist attacks.
The existing bio-surveillance system is also limited in its use of the triggers and its ability to change triggers. In the existing system, the system must be taken off-line to change a trigger, and the trigger must be rebuilt statistically based upon the historical data. For example, if the administrator of the system wants to increase the sensitivity of the system in response to current threats, such as by reducing the trigger from the historical average plus three standard deviations to the historical average plus two standard deviations, the system is taken off-line, and the trigger is rebuilt by reprocessing all of the historical data. Therefore, it is difficult to temporarily change the trigger quickly.
Further, in the existing system, calls and their associated assessments are indexed according to the address information, which can then be displayed in a listing of all the calls along with the problems to try to determine geographic relationships. However, it is difficult to determine geographic relationships simply based upon addresses and because different dispatchers may make different assessments.